Saturday, 29 September 2012

I've just finished a history of watching television
called Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in front of the TV,
although it probably won't be out till next autumn. I hope to be blogging some
of the stuff that didn't make it into the book over the next few months. One of
the more surprisingly enjoyable days I spent researching it was at theNational
Archives at Kew, looking at old Home Office
files on the politics and aesthetics of the new transmitters built in the 1940s
and 1950s at places like Holme Moss, Winter Hill, Caradon and Kirk O'Shotts.
These masts were seen at the time as modern-day cathedral spires, announcing
the arrival of the new god, television, into the region. I found this by one of
my favourite contemporary poets:

The transmitter stands lonely in my mind,

Remote and cold, beyond the aerials

Of gable-ends and guttering, beyond

Ideas of Eiffels casting silvery bolts;

Remote as the front that brought snowfall

to The
Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau;

apologies from high on distant Pennines,

though something of a signal still gets through.

Paul Farley, ‘Winter Hill’

Mundane
quote for the day: 'Last night I went to Elsa Lanchester's. Oh the
horror of TV! It is so utterly, utterly inferior,
yet just enough to keep you enslaved, entrapped, on the lower levels of
consciousness - for a whole lifetime, if necessary. It is a bondage like that
of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott.' - Christopher Isherwood's diary, 28 September
1959

Sunday, 16 September 2012

'Term had just begun. Professor Treece, head of the
department of English, sat at his desk, his back to the window, with the cold,
clear October light shining icily over his shoulders on the turbulent heaps of
papers upon his desk, on to the pale young faces of his three new students. As
the rain rattled against the panes behind him, and the students stared
speculatively out at the last leaves falling damply from the trees, Professor
Treece spoke sonorously ...'

That was how Malcolm Bradbury began his first novel,
Eating People is Wrong, in 1959. October has become September, but the start of
term (or the start of the semester, although I'm not sure we call it that any
more either - I can't keep up) is still, if you work or study in a university,
the turning of the year.

And I still get that stomach-tightening Sunday
night feeling, like I haven't done my homework, even though I know I have. I
feel I should be shining my shoes, filling my new pencil case and asking my mum
to clean my PE kit.

Bonne rentrée scolaire, everyone ... and if you are
about to start your first year at university and are currently watching Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on BBC3, please note that professors
do not normally ride through university libraries on motorbikes.

Thursday, 6 September 2012

According to Michael Palin’s diary for Saturday 9
January 1982, at 9 o’clock that evening he rang his friend George Harrison. After
a few monosyllabic responses, Harrison said pointedly, “You’re obviously not a
Dallas fan, then.” 30 years ago, in a country
with only three TV channels, everyone except Michael Palin seemed to be
watching Dallas. Ed Miliband has said that it was his “secret vice”, which
alarmed his father, the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband, who worried he might be “planning a future in Big Oil”. David Cameron,
probably without generating similar parental alarm, watched Dallas while at Eton.

America was a long way away. Freddie Laker’s transatlantic Skytrain had been offering cheap,
no-frills flights since 1977, but that went into liquidation five years later. The
Atlantic really was an ocean, culturally as well as geographically, and most Britons
saw America only through their television sets. For them Dallas must have
seemed like a vision of
otherness and excess, with big hair, big shoulder pads and big plotlines. To
others it felt like a cultural invasion, American imperialism by other means.
Nowadays, of course, our talent show franchises have ensured that the trash doesn’t
just travel one way.

The new series of Dallas, which begins on 5 September
after a 21-year break, returns to a very different cultural landscape. The Sunday
Telegraph’s long-serving TV critic Philip Purser wrote in his 1992 autobiography,
Done Viewing, that “the gravest disservice that Dallas did television was to
create an appetite for flavours so strong and artificial that the palate was
ruined for more subtle and natural tastes”. But this isn’t quite what happened.

Dallas was a world in which every villain was
irredeemable, every emotion was signposted and everything happened for a
reason, even if it was only that it was all a dream. But most of the successful
dramas imported from the US since Dallas have been the opposite:
multi-stranded, self-consciously clever narratives that demand more
intellectual and emotional work from viewers and do not always reward them with
clear resolutions. In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You, the American cultural
critic Steven Johnson argued that this kind of complex drama had developed to stand up to repetition, as
shows were repeated on the multiplying number of channels and had an afterlife
as DVD box sets.

The
prototype for this type of series was Hill Street Blues, a programme that began
three years after Dallas. Dallas also had its clones, like Dynasty and
Falcon Crest, but they all predeceased it. Now we have become habituated to the
subtle, natural-seeming flavours of The Wire and Mad Men, they may have ruined
our palates for characters who say “You don’t care how many lives you destroy
if you get what you want!” and “You bought me once, you can’t do it anymore!”
to a swelling background chorus of woodwind and grand piano.

In another sense, though, Dallas in its first
incarnation may have created the conditions for it to be a success second time
around. For it was one of the first shows that British viewers watched with a
squint, with an awareness that it was both addictive and absurd. This
peculiarly British compromise was actually engineered by two expats: Terry
Wogan and Clive James. On his Radio 2 show, Wogan treated Dallas as “a weekly
Eurovision Song Contest” and mocked the way that the oil-rich Ewings could only
afford a single telephone in the hall. In his Observer TV column, Clive James homed
in on Dallas’s
strange, compelling details, from its southern pronunciations (prarlm for
problem, lernch for lunch) to the way that Sue Ellen moved her mouth in
different directions to convey emotion.

This
professionally flippant, slyly populist voice, accepting of kitsch and able to
rework it into unintentional comedy, has become the default style not only of
TV reviewers but also of viewers. We have learnt to
read programmes against the grain, to mine enjoyment from them that may never
have been intended by their makers. And thanks to this, Ed Miliband may like to
note, watching
Dallas need no longer be a secret vice.

Sunday, 2 September 2012

I was
just wondering how different the Tempest-themed Olympics Opening Ceremony might
have been if it hadn't been masterminded by two English graduates: the director
Danny Boyle (Bangor) and the writer Frank
Cottrell-Boyce (Oxford).
And so, in a bored moment, I started putting keyword phrases (eg "English
Literature graduate", "graduated in English" etc.) into various
subscription newspaper databases, and came up with the list of English
graduates below. Obviously, in the nature of the exercise it's slanted towards
people in the public eye and I gave up counting writers, journalists and media
people after a while as there were too many of them. But it does give some idea
of the varied careers to which a non-specialist degree like English can lead.
Oh, OK, interest declared - I teach in an English department ...

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog